You bet. You could sense the abject exasperation in the Edmonton Oilers’ bath-house Sunday night after pushing the Anaheim Ducks, the only NHL team to not lose a game in 60 minutes, to the last three 197 seconds, before keeping their streak alive at 13-for-13. Only one other team, the Calgary Flames, has come as close to knocking off the league’s second-best team (home and away) in regulation–losing by the same 3-2 score as the Flames two months ago, less a day, at the Honda Center. And the Ducks hadn’t played since last Wednesday while the Oilers were playing their third in four nights.

You could read the “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” look in Sam Gagner’s eyes after he scored midway through the third to tie it at 2, only to have Dustin Penner, who has 24 points in 28 games and is a staggering plus 20 (think about that, plus 20) get lucky with a shot that ramps off Jeff Petry’s stick and past Ilya Bryzgalov.

The Oilers have dropped nine of their 21 games by at least three goals so have been bad on too many nights, obviously, but they’ve also lost 2-1 in a shootout to LA at the Staples Center, (the next stop on this four-game trip). They lost 3-2 one night in Pittsburgh. They let Boston roar to a 3-0 lead after 20 minutes at home and forced them to an empty-net goal by Jarome Iginla a few nights back. They fell 5-4 in Chicago. They’ve hung tough with five of the six best teams in the league at some point this season, even if they’re physically challenged. But they’re all moral victories, sadly.

Gagner, who had a bounce-back night, not just with his goal but winning a whopping 13 of 16 face-offs (his best night of the season), looked like he wanted to scream in frustration after the game. “We’re not happy, when we had it tied you should at least get it to overtime. We have to find a way to shore up our D-zone,” said Gagner, after being slotted on the fourth line in Vancouver Friday night in a message from coach Dallas Eakins to shape up defensively. He was on the ice for Penner’s winner, though not his fault, certainly.

In the dressing room later, Bryzgalov was asked about the Penner goal, with a reporter suggesting it was a good goal, a hard shot far side. “Not like you should have stopped that,” said the scribe. Bryzgalov feigned like he didn’t understand the question, finally forcing the media to another one. Later, after the rest of the media left, he looked at the reporter and quietly said “it went off a stick.” Good one by Bryzgalov. He wasn’t about to throw anybody’s name out there as an excuse, for the cameras, even if it was a bad break, the puck hitting Petry’s blade on his 27th shift of the night.

“If that last one doesn’t get tipped by a stick, that’s an easy save,” said Oilers’ coach Dallas Eakins, who praised Bryzgalov , who has only given up nine goals in 132 shots in his five Oilers’ appearances for a .932 save percentage. He’s not giving up the net if he continues to play like this, win or lose. “He was outstanding (34 shots),” said Eakins.

On a lot of nights this season, through 35 games now, Eakins has had to come out to face the media music and try to find scraps of positives after losses. At times it’s seemed folly, like he was reaching, but not Sunday. He praised his team’s effort and nobody rolled their eyes because they really were in the fight to borrow one of Eakins’ favourite lines.

“Our mistakes were honest mistakes,” said Eakins.

Of course Teemu Selanne, who has looked like a 43-year-old (43 and five months) for much of the last 60 days, trying to get a puck into the net, got his first since Oct. 20. Why? Because he scores ad nauseum against the Oilers, 49 goals in 81 career games and 91 points.

Afterwards, Selanne said he’d gotten a recent text from old buddy Paul Kariya, now retired. “He told me to go the net. Of course, he was right,” laughed Selanne, who scored from five feet out on Bryzgalov, for just his fourth of the year. “Everybody wants Teemu to do good. We probably knows his numbers better than we know our numbers (as a team),” said Ducks’ coach Bruce Boudreau.

Some observations:

*Ducks’ defenceman Ben Lovejoy continues to shock people with his play. He’s on the Ducks shutdown pair with Cam Fowler when many people felt he’d be a No. 6 or No. 7 defender. He might have been the best Anaheim player, knocking down Taylor Hall twice and Jordan Eberle once with big hits. You’re entitled to ask how come the Oilers can’t unearth a D-man this good or this surprising? You’re also entitled to ask if Hall and Eberle wouldn’t mind getting out of character every so often as they’re being run and telling the hitter that next time they think of doing it, just know they’ll have to skate through two feet of stick shaft or blade, or am I just old-school? Nobody’s saying they have to fight (Luke Gazdic is there for that) but maybe it’s time they tried to buy some room by being a little nasty. Or they could just whack a hitter on the back of the leg as Corey Perry does an awful lot when he doesn’t like the treatment he’s getting.

*Jesse Joensuu played all of six shifts, less than three minutes. He’s game, he’s a big body, but you have to wonder if he skates well enough, often enough, to get there. The Ducks are a heavy team but he barely got off the bench. That should mean something, no?

*David Perron, after so many excellent nights where he was a factor shift after shift with his greasy style, had an off-game against the Ducks. No shots on goal and only 16 minutes. Hey, he’s entitled to a night where we’re not going to him for quotes.

*Will Corey Potter, who was playing for Anton Belov, Perry get another game soon after getting tossed out for shoving Nick Bonino rudely into the boards and having the Oilers kill off his major penalty? Potter’s been wrongly singled out by snarky fans as their pinata but in this case that was not a good penalty.

*I can see the Oilers riding Bryzgalov now with games every second day until Christmas (LA, Colorado, St. Louis, Winnipeg) before a back-to-back Calgary-Philadelphia Dec. 27-28. The game against the Ducks was awfully good for a guy who hadn’t played one in exactly two weeks. He made one lunging, unbelievable stop on Mathieu Perreault in the second period, batting the puck away.

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